100 The American Naturalist. ' [March, 
in heroic reserve for after-dinner speeches, we reach the notes 
of such as quickened the highly sensitive ear of a Nuttall or 
Burroughs by some vague Hkeness in them to other note of 
bird or beast, — chance utterances remotely suggestive of a first 
attempt at exercising the latent talent for mimicry. 
But so nearly do these nice discrimations bring us to the 
mysterious borderland where fact and fiction intermingle, it 
were well to pause and confess our fallibility. 
In his " Birds in the Bush," Mr. Torrey aptly remarks of a 
turn or grace-note, in the song of Dendroeca virens, which he 
was tempted to number among " the latest " of philological dis- 
coveries, that " perhaps after the lapse of ten-thousand years, 
more or less, the whole tribe of Black throated Greens will have 
adopted it, and then when some ornithologist chances to fall in 
with an old-fashioned specimen who still clings to the plain 
song as we commonly hear it, he will fancy that to be the very 
latest modern improvement and proceed forwith to enlighten 
the scientific world with a description of the novelty." 
Beyond what has been said of this native genius in feathers, 
esting subject, the influence of domestication and human train- 
ing upon the language of birds, save to note that every exper- 
iment made with a view to solve the problem of its origin and 
development justifies the belief that bird language, as now 
existent, is, like human language, " the result of some opera- 
tion of the imitative principle, quickened in all probability by 
circumstances which we are able to a certain extent to recon- 
struct, and aided at first very largely, but always in lessening 
measure, by the language of sign and gesture. ' 
The joke of Prof Schleicher, " If a pig were ever to say to 
me, ' I am a pig,' it would, ipso facto, cease to be a pig," while 
controverting the ultra Darwinian theory by its reference to 
the impassable language barrier, twixt man and the rest of the 
animal kingdom, nevertheless assumes a serious and question- 
able significance if the names of certain birds were substituted 
for the pigs.' Independently of the question of man's descent, 
1 See Philology; Appleton's Ency., New Ed. 
